Instead they and other owners of second homes here have come up against the same hurdles: federal flood insurance maps that would force them to raise their homes or face exorbitant premiums, construction estimates that exceed Sandy insurance payouts, and limited federal aid for elevating houses — in the Silvanis' case, half of the $60,000 one contractor quoted.

"We just got $7,000 for the exterior. It's going to cost us $5,400 just to have the roof done," Toni Silvani said from the couple's home in Hopewell, N.J., about 70 miles away. "The house is nothing but two-by-fours. There's still water between the panes on the patio slider. ... We still have to pay taxes, on what? An empty shell of a house."

The economic fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be the future of the Barnegat Bay region for decades to come unless communities do more to prepare for sea-level rise, say Rutgers University researchers whose new report focuses intently on the economic risks from climate change for New Jersey's Ocean County.

For communities like Beach Haven West, it's an ominous warning that former marshlands converted to resort housing in the 1960s — and now, year-round homes — will be hit again and again without new investments to keep neighborhoods safer from high-water storms. Those measures could include both "hard" public works, like improved drainage systems and wave barriers, and "soft" projects like restoring wetlands as storm buffers, the report says.

"The biggest thing we run into is people are confused: 'Do I have to raise my house or not?' " said Pastor Drew Overgard of Cedar Run Assembly of God in West Creek, N.J., which sponsors volunteer teams that are rebuilding homes in Beach Haven West. Coordinated by churches of the Southern Ocean County Community Resource Center, the work crews are trying to make homes habitable again for seniors, the uninsured and under-insured.

But with new federal flood maps dictating higher first-floor elevations to qualify for affordable flood insurance, those families still must make long-term rebuilding plans.

"A lot of these folks are elderly people whose mortgage was paid off, so they didn't have flood insurance," Overgard said. In some waterside neighborhoods, "what I'm hearing is a lot of people are going to walk away from their houses."

"It's not just sea-level rise," said Robin Leichenko, an economic geographer with Rutgers who led the climate impact project. "There's a whole fleet of things people need to think through," such as longer droughts and forest fire seasons in the Pine Barrens," a heavily forested area of coastal plain that stretches across more than seven counties in southern New Jersey.

Barnegat Bay experts who got an peek at draft pages from Leichenko's report a week before Sandy hit say they proved eerily accurate in predicting the economic carnage from the storm, including prolonged and uncertain rebuilding for homeowners and a recreational boating and fishing industry that's still on the ropes.

The report predicted exactly the economic consequences of the past six months, said Stan Hales, executive director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership., The federally financed research and conservation group commissioned the report and recently released the first public view of it after months of review and confirmation from outside experts.

"It says point-blank Ocean County has a large population of mostly elderly on fixed incomes, and an economy that's more dependent on small business who will be in trouble when they take this kind of hit," Hales said. "It gives validity to the problems you hear."

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Advocates for the recreational and commercial fishing industries had hoped for emergency money as part of a $60 billion Sandy aid package, but congressional budget politics scuttled that in January. Now the industry still is waiting for money from federal Community Development Block Grants, but it's not clear whether that will be coming, or when.

"We're still really struggling in terms of getting funding for recovery," said Melissa Danko, executive director of the Marine Trades Association of New Jersey.

The report comes at a time when other Rutgers geographers have set up a new online tool system called NJFloodMapper.org that helps people and communities foresee what potential sea level rise could do in the coming decades. Viewed in tandem, the economic report and NJFloodMapper say Jersey Shore communities need to start planning now for oncoming realities.

"We heard from them about storm drains just constantly flowing into streams. The water levels are such that they just constantly back up into the streets," said Lisa Auermullar, watershed coordinator at the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve. She has done similar work to find out how climate changes appear in local communities.

"Although they might not call it sea level rise or climate change, they were definitely seeing changes in their communities," she said.

Leichenko's team got an earful, too, on why New Jersey is not better prepared. A lot comes down to the state's proliferation of local government, with towns too small to take effective actions on their own and no regional consensus on what to do.

"We hope this report will guide some of the decision-making. ... We hope everyone takes the recommendations seriously" as communities rebuild and plan for the future, Hales said. The paper coupled with experience from Sandy's storm surge "could be evidence for (property) buy-outs."

Now, Leichenko said the question is "what is the Jersey Shore going to look like post-Sandy? It's going to be different."

The threats that climate and federal policy responses pose can have big social implications, she said: "Who can afford to be at the Shore? ... This isn't poverty. It's middle-income people who will be affected."

A 1961 aerial photograph shows the early phase of Mystic Island, N.J., when the waterfront lagoon community was being created as vacation homes on filled wetlands in Little Egg Harbor Township. Houses on ground-level slab foundations were heavily damaged in superstorm Sandy’s Oct. 29 surge and those neighborhoods will be increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise, Rutgers University researchers say.(Photo: Asbury Park, N.J., Press)